Vegan Paper

I just saw this blog post by Jonathan Beaton. I am totally going to try making veggie paper. However, I think I’m going to use leftover pulp from my VitaMix when I’m done juicing. I don’t use a separate juicer, I just put my pulp through a mesh nut milk bag. I’ve been enjoying the juice and have either been composting the pulp or feeding it to my dogs, but it sometimes ends up with the consistency of homemade paper clay and I wonder about its potential as an art material! Has anyone experimented with this? I would probably add a little bit of soap flakes or something to inhibit mold growth, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. I can also see a potential use as a clay for making beads.

What little girls are made of…

This can be seen live tomorrow at A.R.C. gallery in Chicago, in the show “You Lookin’ at Me?” The theme of the show, as stated on the website, is this: “This exhibition will celebrate what we honor and admire and/or what we fear and disdain about ourselves. We are seeking images that deal with these issues. We seek to present a cast of characters. We want to feature various kinds of depictions, stylizations, comic book portrayals, straight portraits, abstractions, or however else you imagine yourself.”

It should be a great show. I’ll be at the opening tomorrow night, I hope to see you there!

ARC 40th Anniversary Video

Here’s a video from the ARC Gallery 40th Anniversary Exhibition. It was great to reconnect with women from the gallery! I also attended a panel discussion the day after the opening. Past and current presidents were there to answer questions about the history, present and future of the gallery.

My piece is at 1:46-1:51 in the video, bottom right corner of the frame.The show is up for the next month so if you are in the Chicago area looking for something to do, stop by and see it!

ARC Gallery 40th Anniversary

ARC Gallery and Educational Foundation is a women’s art gallery in Chicago, IL that has been going strong for the past 40 years. I have had the privilege to be a member and associate member back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. I think I was an associate member at the time of their 30th Anniversary. Although I haven’t been an active member in several years, this galley holds a special place in my heart. I was thrilled to be invited to be part of their 40th anniversary member’s show. The opening night is Friday, September 27. The photo doesn’t do the piece justice, so you’ll just have to come out and see it in person, along with the work of about 100 diverse women artists of all ages and walks of life. I am looking forward to seeing some folks I haven’t seen in a long time!

Michaelangelo

 

Michelangelo: Study of a Striding Male

I’ve been reading a great blog called The Culture Monk  by Kenneth Justice. You should check him out, he’s got a ton of thought-provoking posts and the one I just read is titled “Getting Naked for Art is Wrong…Really?”

The post reminded me of funny story…when I was an art student in college I took figure drawing as required for my major. At the end of the semester my Italian Nonna wanted to see what I’d done over the semester so my Mom and I packed the car with my art to take it over to her. I started pulling out the nude figure drawings to leave them behind. My Mom said, “Why aren’t you bringing those? I think you should”. I was mortified. Show the nude drawings to my modest, religious little old grandma?  But my Mom just said, “All those old churches in Italy have nudes in them. Let’s see how she reacts”. Reluctantly, I agreed to bring them. It turns out, she really liked them. Particularly a pastel drawing of a very handsome young man with nice buns.

It wasn’t until years later when I went to Italy on my honeymoon that I understood why Nonna was ok with her granddaughter drawing naked men. My Mom was right…it wasn’t just the frescos in the churches that had nude and semi-nude figures in them (and not all of them were stick-thin). There were centuries-old larger-than-life marble statues out in the streets like someone forgot to put them away. We never actually made it to see the David because the line was so long and there was so much else to see and yeah, there was a lot of nudity. But you didn’t think of it as overtly sexual, it was just amazing art depicting the beauty of the human form.

Now, It is possible my Nonna didn’t realize there was an actual naked handsome man in the classroom that the class was drawing. Or maybe she did.

insomnia

intimacy painting by laura lencioni acrylic on canvas, 36″ x 40″

waking up in the middle
waking up in the middle of the
wake up in the middle of the night

have you ever built a life
only to have it evaporate from underneath your fingertips…

I want to crumble in your arms tonight,
and in your love
to give up the fight

have you ever built a life
only to have it evaporate from underneath your fingertips…

can’t say if its wrong or right
I keep waking up in the middle of the night

have you ever built a life
and have it evaporate from underneath your fingertips…

and the echo of our love survives
whispers to a future that seems bright

I can’t say if it is wrong or right
I just keep waking up in the middle of the night

Winter Bike Art Show

Hey everyone! I’ll be in the Winter Bike Art Show, opening on February 22. I’d love to see you all there!

Here’s a sneak peek:

Of  course the show will have amazing bike themed art of all kinds, and you can go to the Critical Mass website to find out more about the show and anything else about biking in Chicago!

Something from Nothing

To the best of my knowledge, only God (or whatever name you’d like for the divine) can truly make something from nothing. Maybe. We don’t know for sure how that works. However, to me as an artist, it is not only possible, but very desirable, to take something of “no value” and make it into something of value. I put quotes around the words “no value” because I’m pretty sure that all matter is valuable. Humans put value on things based on how useful we think a thing is to us. In any case, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

Here’s a fun challenge to get you thinking about the value of the raw matter all around you: set a timer for five minutes and walk outside. If it is winter where you are (I am in Chicago), don’t even bother putting on your coat (but shoes are a good idea) and in those five minutes, gather as many useless items as you want from your immediate environment. They can be natural, as in a stick or rock, or something manmade, like a pop can tab.

Go inside. If you like, do an internet search for your objects: “stick art”, “pop can tab crafts”, “Oak Leaf properties”, etc. Especially check out YouTube tutorials. I”m pretty sure you will find that there are folks using these raw materials to make stuff cool enough to warrant posting a video. It is amazing.

Finally, make something from your objects. Just try it. How does it feel? Frustrating, confusing, liberating? Really pay attention to the inherent properties of your materials: texture, color, strength, brittle/flexible and so on. How easy is it to get your materials to do what you want them to do? Once you have your finished piece, how do you feel about the raw material you worked with?

If you do this exercise often enough, you will start to look at the world around you with different eyes. Things you disregarded as background noise, like weeds, dandelion fluff, rusted metal, bark and the like start holding interest. What are its physical properties? Would they lend themselves to a task I want to do?

This, my friends, used to be how humans looked at the world around them, until very recently (a few hundred years or less). There were no boxed solutions to search for in a special place, a store. The solutions and materials needed for survival were outside all around, and to be successful you had to keep your eyes open every time you stepped out the door.

I suspect that in spite of our pre-made conveniences, the ones that came from a factory and deemed valuable by virtue of costing money, it is still true. In order to gain real value from our immediate environment, we need to keep our eyes open.

I challenge you to step outside and see the world this way, and I’d love to hear about the results of your experiment!

Raw stuff for this piece: Kentucky coffee tree seeds found on walks home from work, canna Lilly seeds from garden, dryer lint, pics from an old gardening catalog. Not found objects: white flour, baking powder, powdered soap, and glue. Paint, glitter, glaze, string and plastic beads.

I Have No Hobbies

I have long been irked by the word hobby. Such as when people say to me, Oh, you’re an artist? What a great hobby!

I cringe every time I hear this. What does a hobby imply? To me, a hobby is something that is fun, but if you don’t have time for it, that’s no big deal. It’s extra. You don’t get paid for it, and you do it primarily for relaxation, that it is secondary to your real work (what you do for money) and you are expected to drop it when it is no longer relaxing or fun (i.e., there’s more important work to do so it doesn’t fit into your schedule anymore). People look at you funny if you spend too much time on your hobbies, and parents with small children certainly don’t have time for them. By this definition, I have no hobbies. Yes, with a family and paid work and unpaid work, I certainly don’t have time for hobbies. About my art, and my garden, and several related activities that feed into the same vision, I feel that:

1. I’d like to get paid or compensated or earn a livelihood from these activities, I just haven’t figured out a way to do it yet, but that doesn’t mean I won’t or can’t

2. I believe they have social value and importance to other people, not just as stress relief or a break from my “real” work

3. I continue to pursue them even when they add extra stress to my life, because I think they are too important to let go of in the face of other responsibilities

4. If I were to drop some of my “hobbies”  when they became inconvenient, other living beings would die.

This, to me, sounds more like vocation than hobby. The other day I tried to think of a single thing that I do on a regular basis that would qualify as a “hobby”, and I could not think of any. Maybe collecting Breyer Model Horses….but I stopped the collecting part long ago, and now I just look at the (very cool) collection.

So, in an effort to make peace with the word “hobby”, I looked up the etymology of the word. Bless my soul, Hobby used to mean a kind of horse. A lightweight, small, versatile  workhorse. Or a child’s toy horse, as in “hobby horse”. OH! there you go! Yes I do have lots of hobbies! Probably about 30 of them lined up on a shelf, that I collected as a child!

Ah, there. I feel better about the word hobby now. How can I hate a word that started out as meaning a kind of horse?

Inja Cho-kinetic and emotional paintings

Inja Cho’s booth was on the other side of me at the Ravenswood Art Walk. Her paintings were passionate, full of life and vitality, and the full of rich colors, texture and movement. Each painting was like a dance. She also had greeting cards made of many of the paintings. I wanted to upload an example of the paintings but I can’t find the ones I took of her booth! But check out the link above, you’ll see what I mean.